School battles in Rockford and Baton Rouge show the difficulty of ending racial injustice

Brown Vs. Board Of Education: 50 Years Later

As the desegregation lawsuit in Baton Rouge stretched on and students' achievement scores dropped, community support for the school system faded. For decades Baton Rouge voters refused to approve any tax increases that would have put money back into the schools.

"If you've done damage for 30 years, you don't get out of that in a real short time," said Roger Moser, president since 1995 of the now-integrated East Baton Rouge School Board.

Finally in 2001, about 30 community and business leaders formed a task force in hopes of resolving the 45-year-old case. Last year the NAACP and the board settled the suit under an agreement that would preserve the integrated magnet schools.

Yet the agreement didn't fix what triggered the suit in the 1950s, said Robert C. Williams, an NAACP attorney who argued the Baton Rouge lawsuit from 1971 until its end. Black students, he said, still get a separate and unequal education.

Of the 95 schools in the district, 57 are more than 75 percent black. Baton Rouge High School, a top-rated magnet school, offers 35 advanced courses to its 1,200 students, evenly split between whites and blacks. Glen Oaks High, a 99 percent black neighborhood school on the state's "academic warning" list, doesn't offer a single advanced class.

"The money stayed in the white schools," Williams said. "The black high schools look the same as they did in the 1950s."

And Gilmer Wright elementary? Today the building houses a preschool program for 100 low-income 4-year-olds. All of them are black.

Dividing line in Rockford

Rockford had no Jim Crow laws. Instead, this conservative, blue-collar city had an unwritten understanding: Whites belonged in separate neighborhoods and schools from blacks and Latinos.

The racial line in the city, then Illinois' second largest, was neatly drawn by the Rock River, with blacks and Mexicans on the west side, white families on the east. The divide helps explain why it took so long for this town to acknowledge and fix a school system that often wrote off minority children as ineducable.

Not until a trial in 1993--four decades after Brown--was Rockford District 205 forced to address the problems in a comprehensive way. Drastic measures followed that would leave the school system in tatters.

The trial demonstrated an insidious pattern of neglect: The system had placed generations of minority students in segregated and shockingly inferior schools. Tests and teachers pegged black children as academic losers in kindergarten. In one school, a converted coal bin became a classroom for black students. In-school segregation was so pronounced that white and minority children were purposely kept apart on playgrounds and in music programs. School supplies were unevenly distributed, so that white schools had nine microscopes for every one given to minority schools.

"It is the story of a school district that, at times, has committed such open acts of discrimination as to be cruel and committed others with such subtlety as to raise discrimination to an art form," Magistrate Judge P. Michael Mahoney wrote in a 1994 ruling.

The case came at a time when desegregation orders were a distant memory for most other districts, which fought their fiercest battles over integration in the '60s and '70s. Rockford had its chance to fix things in 1970, when it was first sued over the treatment of minority children.

It didn't work out that way.

In 1974, Ed Wells was a black freshman forced to attend the overwhelmingly white East High to meet desegregation quotas. The school board wouldn't pay for transportation, so black children paid the 35-cent fare and packed themselves onto public buses--sometimes 80 deep in buses with 30 seats. The cross-town commute took more than an hour.

`Treated like invaders'

The all-white staff largely did not welcome the newcomers, said retired administrator Bowen, who was East's assistant principal at the time and later testified about their treatment in the 1993 trial.

Counselors assigned most of them to remedial or general classes, pushing white children into more challenging courses to keep them separate. Teachers complained about having the new students in their class. The school nurse was so uncomfortable treating black students that she would spray her office with deodorant and wipe down her desk whenever one left, according to court testimony.

Ill-prepared by their old schools, the freshmen struggled to keep up academically and acted out, fighting with classmates and cussing out teachers. The discipline was swift and severe, and it weeded out most of the black newcomers by the end of Wells' freshman year.

"We were treated like invaders," Wells said. Because his parents expected him to go to college, Wells pushed to take chemistry and algebra. Often he was the only black face in class.

"It was sink or swim, and most of the kids who came with me sank," he said.